Abducted (Blue Barbarian Series Book 1) Page 5

  “Wait,” Niki looks around, seeking something.

  I remember the shelf in our own caged area. There is a similar shelf in this room and I stride to it, banging the walls to see what hidden openings there are.

  Sure enough, one opens to reveal the thin garments that drape my mate. I grab a handful and Lucie covers herself as I look away.

  I want them both to understand I only wish to see my mate bared. Only Niki will stir my loins from this point forward. My chest aches with pleasure at the thought of her one day bearing our children. Will they look human? Or like me? And will she fight the thought of being my mate? I’m not sure whether or not she will have a choice, and it makes me sad that she may choose not to mate me. I will forever pine for her affection.

  “How many more gowns are there?” Lucie asks Niki.

  “Eight.”

  Lucie looks disappointed. “No doubling up. I guess the others will need some. We'll have to go around with our headlights on.”

  The females giggle, even though I do not understand this phrase.

  “I suppose we'll have to break their tubes,” Niki says. Suddenly she takes my hand and peers at the knuckles. “Oh, no. You're bleeding.”

  The purplish hue on my knuckles is barely existent. It makes me feel warmed that she cares. But it is a mere scratch and my voice is gruff. “It is nothing.”

  “We don't have to break the cages,” Lucie says. She walks over to the wall where we had walked in. “I saw them push this when I was put in the second time.” Her hand pushes a round spot on the wall, and gas hisses from the other chambers. One by one, each pod opens from a door on top.

  Still, the humans inside sleep.

  “Now what?” Niki says. “Oh, wait, I have an idea. Drakar, remember when they carried Lucie into our room and warmed her with that orange lamp? Then injected something into her? And I rubbed her arms and legs? Shall we try it?”

  “It cannot hurt,” I agree. After all, the other females are as good as dead now. I lift one from the pod and sling her over my shoulder. My own mate, I would carry delicately. This one, I do not know.

  “Wow, he's strong,” Lucie says.

  “You have no idea.”

  I head toward the door and carefully peer out, just in case the other aliens outside have not perished. I do not worry about Lech. I saw him touch the poison and I know he is too sick this many hours later to be effective. By morning, he will be dried from the inside out. My people use the tree bark as an effective way to keep the smell of decay on corpses from night predators. The tree bark is speared and placed in the mouth of a dead person and cures the body, drying it instead of allowing it to rot.

  “Come,” I tell the other two, and leave them to follow me back down the hall to where Niki and I had mated.

  As we pass the chief alien in the hallway, Lucie gasps.

  “Don't look,” Niki tells her.

  We enter our room and it is still dark inside.

  “Oh, it's so warm in here,” Lucie exclaims.

  It makes me realize both women are cold in the thin gowns they wear. Their nipples have hardened and protrude from the fabric. Suddenly I realize what the headlights must mean.

  “They never turned down our heat,” I say to Niki.

  “No. I didn't realize how warm they made it.”

  I do. It was to force us to breed many more times after they made it cold enough for us to cuddle.

  My eyes can see in the dark, so I peer toward the wall where the pod releasing button was in the other room. We have a similar button that I had not noticed, fool that I am. I push it, and light floods the room.

  “Perfect,” Niki says and it pleases me to have brought her the light she needs. My stomach feels strangely warm and tingly.

  “Please, bring her here.” I carefully drop the dead weight of the female onto the table. I want to please Niki some more, so I am moving more gingerly with the human female. “I will go get more,” I grunt.

  The women are already distracted, going through the drawers for the synringe-things. The injectables. The alien technology I do not care about.

  Chapter Four

  Niki:

  By the time Drakar returns with another girl, the one we have, Miranda, is awake and crying. We've explained to her what’s happened, but she’s in shock and hasn’t even noticed she's naked.

  She screams at the sight of Drakar, and it pisses me off. Apparently, it also pisses off Lucie.

  “Shut up,” Lucie snaps. “This is Drakar. Without him, you'd be dead.”

  Miranda stops her sniveling and stares at Drakar with wide eyes. I feel bad because Lucie is so harsh, but then I feel a little jealous. Is she staring at his massive chest? His amazing biceps? He’s mine. I mean, I saw him first.

  I hope to have hot, addictive sex with him again. Ever since I had a taste of blue barbarian, I’m horny as hell. I’m not sure if I’m just attracted to him, or if his mating voodoo works on both parties, even if I’m a different species. The last part I’m not sure about. I’m still human, and we just don’t have those types of instant, magnified pheromones running through us. Then again, who knows what the purpose of the alien tingle-sex bracelets was?

  Poor Drakar’s face is inscrutable. I wonder what it must be like to have a woman suddenly start screaming at the sight of you. I feel bad for him, so I reach out and stroke his arm. “Thank you for bringing us another one.” He peers down at my hand and smiles. It’s so easy to please him.

  I turn toward the new girl so I’m not caught staring at him like a sappy fool. “Miranda, grab a gown and sit in that chair so we can lay the next one down.”

  Miranda blinks and looks down, and I feel a moment of glee at her embarrassment. I'd feel pissed if Drakar was checking her out, but it doesn't seem like he cares. She moves and wobbles on her feet. Lucie grabs her arm, steadies her, and they maneuver to the chair I had been tied to.

  Drakar lays the next cold body down.

  “I will go get another,” he says curtly, with a glance at Miranda.

  I nod, knowing he doesn't want to be present when another one wakes up to scream. I wish I could kiss him, to let him know I don't care how frightened they are of his appearance. Truth is, he's kind of hot. Especially in that primitive loincloth, because I know what lies beneath it. He’s seriously hung. His legs bulge with strength, and they’re muscled all the way down to his feet.

  His eyes soften as he looks at me, but then he leaves, so Lucie and I work on the next girl.

  This one wakes and looks dazed, and Lucie seems more rushed as she keeps her eye on the door. “What's your name?” she asks her, snapping her fingers in her face.

  “I'm Greta. Everyone calls me Gigi.”

  “Well, I'm going to make this short and sweet, Gigi. I know this is an emotional experience and all, but we don't have a lot of time here. You've been abducted by aliens, just like the rest of us. They've been killed by another alien, he's our friend. Drakar. He's blue and he's big. He'll be bringing the next girl in so we can rouse her. Don't hurt his feelings by screaming at him.”

  Gigi nods, her eyes wide. I wonder how much she really comprehends, because like Miranda, she hasn't even realized she's naked. Speaking of which, Lucie must have handed Miranda a gown at some point and I didn't even notice, because Miranda is seated primly in the chair dressed in it. I grab another one and hand it to Gigi, and Lucie and I hold her arms to help her stand.

  “Okay, Miranda,” I say, gently this time, because we're starting to smooth out the wrinkles in rousing the girls, and poor Miranda was our first. Her experience was a lot more bumpy. “Move over to the floor so Gigi can sit in the chair before Drakar returns with another. We'll have an assembly line going.”

  Miranda nods and then stands. “I'll get her dressed,” she says quietly.

  I feel a bit of surprise that she impressed me. The shock must have worn off. Lucie meets my eyes and gives me a small smile. We move Gigi to the chair and Miranda helps her with her gown right befo
re the door opens again.

  Drakar brings the next one to the table and doesn't even look toward Gigi. I see her staring at him, but after the warning, there's just a bit of curiosity instead of full-blown fear.

  Fear is what fuels hatred. And hatred is what fuels prejudice. Lord, we could have cleaned up our own planet's issues if we just would have brought diverse innocent children together instead of introducing other races as paranoid adults. It's the adults that teach bigotry to the little ones.

  This time when Drakar lays down the next girl, he turns to me and brushes my bangs out of my eyes, tucking them behind my ear. “You look tired,” he says in his native tongue.

  I realize he can't understand what the rest of us are saying, because we're using English. I'll have to remedy him with a brain blast. But not today, because he’s right. I am tired.

  “I'm fine,” I say, and give his fingers a quick squeeze. I hope he can feel the promise for later.

  The room has gone silent as the others watch us. But I don't care. Drakar was my first friend upon wakening, and he means a lot to me. I hug him to show him how much, and his arm comes around me, too.

  One by one, we rouse the rest of the humans and then we're all huddled in the room. By the time we rouse the last one, Miranda replaces me in helping Lucie.

  We've figured Lucie speaks French and English, and one girl, Valencia, speaks Spanish and nothing else. Surprisingly, no one else speaks Spanish, though Lucie can communicate a little by knowing French.

  Spanish is not one of my downloads.

  We've told the girls about my ability to transfer languages, but I've repeated the same story so many times, I've kind of forgotten who knows what. I'm sure it's the same with Lucie, she looks confused also. The other girls huddle on the floor in their gowns, whispering. Sharing abduction stories.

  I move closer to Drakar and we drift away from the rest. I wrap my arm around his waist and he returns the gesture with his arm draped around my shoulders. This last girl we wake may see him and scream, and I want to be here for him. Of course, Lucie will tell her not to, but there's always a possibility that she won't speak English or will be in such shock that she won't listen. But everything goes smoothly upon her awakening, and soon she's dressed and huddling with the rest. There's a type of camaraderie that humans share when tossed into stressful situations, and we definitely have that in spades. I can see that Drakar is puzzled.

  “None of you know each other?” he asks.

  “No. We all came from different places on Earth.”

  “We have but one tribe on my planet. There are not any others.”

  “There aren't? You all live together?”

  “We all look the same,” he says. “Not like humans. You look different and you speak different languages. We are all the same. I guess we cannot spread over the entire planet; the conditions here are too harsh. We cannot be caught outside at dark.”

  I notice the interest of the other girls as we speak in his native tongue. Lucie responds to us in his language, and I smile like a proud parent on kindergarten day. She’s my first download.

  “I told the girls one day you'll try to give them the other languages, too,” she says.

  I nod. “One day. It's exhausting. Yours wiped me out. I'm still feeling the effects of it.”

  Drakar's arm tightens around me, and I don't think he realizes the enormity of this.

  “We need to find the meat I hunted earlier,” he says. “So we can feed them. We are stuck here until the morning light, at least.”

  I nod.

  “Lucie, can you and Miranda hold down the fort while we forage for dinner? Don't let anyone leave the room. It's the only one with any warmth, anyway, so they shouldn’t want to. But there could be dangers we don't know about yet.”

  “Of course,” Lucie says, and then translates in English to Miranda.

  Then Drakar turns to me. “Perhaps you should stay, too. I'm not sure what we'll run into.”

  “You may need my help,” I reason. “We're a great team. Your brute strength and my knowledge of other things...” Syringes and rousing abducted girls. And sex. Don’t forget the sex.

  “I just do not want you to come to unnecessary harm.”

  A large finger strokes softly down my cheek.

  “Then I'll be safest with you.”

  I smile and he grunts, and then leads me to the front door. As he always does, he takes care to peer outside before leaving the room, and off we go to explore the alien vessel.

  We avoid the hallway where Bossy's body lays cooling, and I smell the spilt blood. Since the ship is on emergency lighting only, I imagine all air filters have been shut down. No matter. We head the opposite way.

  One room shows Lech, spread-eagled in a lounge-like chair that looks like it belongs in a dental office. He’s completely still and looks hideous. His skin is dried and leathery, like a giant raisin left out in the sun.

  “Is he dead?” I whisper.

  Drakar agrees. “That tells us they were not as strong as my people. My tribe would have suffered until dawn with the poison. He expired quickly.”

  Drakar wants to pull me away, but something catches my eye. This room has the usual cold metal tables and chairs the other rooms have, but in here the furniture is covered in removable, soft-cushioned pads.

  Oh, how the better half live.

  I pull one from a chair. “If we take these to the girls, they can spread them on the floor to sleep.”

  Drakar nods, and gathers three or four in each arm. I can only carry one, and half of it drags.

  We trudge back to the room to haul them in. Drakar begins to spread them along the edge of the walls. The girls watch the muscle play in his chest and arms as he moves.

  “He’s strong,” someone says.

  I glare in that direction.

  Drakar turns to me. “Stay,” he instructs.

  I'm still shivering, because the rest of the ship is colder than our room, and I’m barefoot in the thin dress. I nod, because I know he wants me to warm just a little. I certainly don’t want to argue because the jealousy gene I developed since sleeping with him is turning me into a shrew.

  He heads back to retrieve more of the mattress-pads.

  “So how many languages can you speak?” One of the girls asks.

  “I don't know. There’s no one to test them out with. And there's no one to ask. The two girls they experimented on before me died.”

  It was bitchy of me to mention the deaths, but I’m feeling mean. This makes the girls a lot more somber and it's a good thing. They need to realize how dire this planet is. They need to see they were the lucky ones, to have slept unknowingly in the pods while we learned firsthand about the dangers for everyone.

  “We're exploring the ship to make sure there are no other aliens aboard.” I tell them. “We're looking for a couple of animals that Drakar hunted earlier, so we can have some food to eat. On this planet, you don't go outside in the dark. There are too many predators, even for his people.”

  “I'm a vegetarian,” one of the girls says.

  I look her in the eye. “Not anymore.”

  I'm glad when the door opens and Drakar brings the last of the mattresses in.

  He looks over to me. “Do you wish to stay?”

  I shake my head. “I'm coming.”

  Truth is, I'd much rather be with him.

  We head back, this time skipping the room where Lech is mummifying. We find a kitchen of sorts and inside a clear box—much like the tubes the girls were in—is the bird-fish carcass and the hairy cow-thing.

  Drakar raises his arm to smash the glass box, and I stop him with a touch. There’s some kind of bumpy writing written on the front. I run my hand over the Braille-like bumps, and suddenly the text appears in my head.

  “It’s processing the kill,” I say, surprised with how it popped into my brain. “It’s set for human, Blaedonian, and Drurian consumption. That’s you, right? Blaedonian?”

  He nods.
>
  “They must have been the Drurians.”

  Down at the bottom of the writing, is a sentence that says: Change this.

  I press on the words, and the screen changes.

  Okay your changes, it tells me.

  I wipe through the word Drurian and it disappears and then I hit the okay sentence. A metallic arm comes down from the wall, and Drakar growls as he steps in front of me.

  “It’s okay. I just changed the Drurian food processing. More for us this way.”

  The metal arm swings behind the box, picks up a container with a straw and whisks it to a sink, dumping it.

  “Eww. They liquefy their food,” I said.

  Drakar nods. “Makes sense. They can’t chew with those little mouths.”

  The boxes begin to whir. The instructions change on the front panel. Processing…Step one: deboning and skinning. Step two: spicing. Step three: roasting. Step four: slicing. Approximate completion: thirty to forty-five minutes.

  “It’s going to take a little while. Let’s look around some more and come back for this.”

  Outside in the hallway is a window. I look out, and I’m disappointed that they’ve blackened it. I feel around the sill.

  “What is it?” Drakar asks.

  “I’m looking for something to open the shutter so I can see outside.”

  He looks amused. “It is open.”

  I blink and look toward the window again. “I can’t see anything.”

  He nods. “Because it is night. We have no light at night.”

  “You don’t have a moon or stars?”

  “What is that?”

  “Did you see the night on my planet?”

  He nods.

  “The stars are what twinkle at night in the sky. And the moon is…like another planet nearby. It glows from our sun during the day and then the light is cast on our planet at night.”

  “We do not have these.”

  I wonder about that. They can’t exist in a galaxy without anything else. There has to be another explanation. Maybe their planet is surrounded by a gas that blocks out the view of their stars? Yet that wouldn’t account for the daytime sun shining through. I shrug. It’s not something I can figure out now anyway.